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Buying Champions and Levelling Accounts

Toastey··1 votes·518 views

Just curious, but how much monthly revenue does Riot make from people purchasing champions and rune pages with RP, and what percentage of profit is that revenue? If it's some insignificant number, I suggest doing away with IP entirely. Just give everyone the entire champion pool and all runes right upon creating a new account, along with 30 mastery points.

It's absurd to expect players to spend literally hundreds or thousands of in-game hours earning the IP to buy champions and runes. It's utterly ridiculous to force players to play with handicapped runes and masteries for hundreds of hours, and then expect them to know what to do with the ability to draft complete runes and mastery pages.

As for levelling accounts, I understand that it's to place some sort of restriction on who can and cannot enter ranked queues. This is fine, but when levels are also tied to available masteries, summoner spells, and runes, it's too much. Either tie only queue type restrictions to level, or do away with levels entirely and revive the Elo bracketing system of Season 1, wherein the bottom 50% of ranked players were considered Unranked. If the latter path is taken, it damn well better be the case that Elo values are displayed clearly for everyone to see, thereby forcing Riot to be held accountable for good (or bad) matchmaking.

As things currently stand, Riot has a paradoxical stance on "barriers to entry", stating that they don't want a high barrier to entry (which is hard enough to prevent with a genre as opaque to outsiders as MOBAs are), but hypocritically crippling low-level players and making it an excruciating experience for new players looking to get into the game.

13 Comments

Korillo3 votes

Yes it is absurd for a free-to-play game to promote reasons to continue playing their game. What an absurd world we live in.

Toastey1 votes

Hm maybe a game being well-designed should be a reason for players to play it. Or maybe the game is too buggy and has mediocre gameplay, so you have to artificially inflate gameplay hours by forcing players to play the equivalent of a full work week just to afford the new champion. :>

You are aware that it takes between 30-40 in-game hours to earn 6300 IP, right?

Korillo2 votes

[{quoted}](name=Toasted Pigeon,realm=NA,application-id=cIfEodbz,discussion-id=gxdGvvpj,comment-id=00010000,timestamp=2016-02-09T14:56:15.814+0000)

Hm maybe a game being well-designed should be a reason for players to play it. Or maybe the game is too buggy and has mediocre gameplay, so you have to artificially inflate gameplay hours by forcing players to play the equivalent of a full work week just to afford the new champion. :>

You are aware that it takes between 30-40 in-game hours to earn 6300 IP, right?

Yes I am aware of how long it takes to grind IP (you can do 6300 in far less then 30-40, typically can be done in 20-25). It took 12 weeks of playing at least one game everyday (one win) to get 9 full Rune pages which doesn't seem unreasonable for a new player. This is 3 months which should give them a good amount of time to level up an account and learn the game to prepare them for ranked.

Toastey1 votes

mfw you think one game a day for 3 months is adequate preparation for serious ranked play

No wonder 70%+ of the ranked player-base is Bronze.

Some people have lives outside of League, and don't have time to minmax IP. Some people would like to enjoy all facets of the game, whether that be a cool champion or testing a new rune page, without having to sink in a full work week's worth of effort to try out something that they might not even like.

Korillo2 votes

[{quoted}](name=Toasted Pigeon,realm=NA,application-id=cIfEodbz,discussion-id=gxdGvvpj,comment-id=0001000000000000,timestamp=2016-02-09T15:14:21.828+0000)

mfw you think one game a day for 3 months is adequate preparation for serious ranked play

No wonder 70%+ of the ranked player-base is Bronze.

Some people have lives outside of League, and don't have time to minmax IP. Some people would like to enjoy all facets of the game, whether that be a cool champion or testing a new rune page, without having to sink in a full work week's worth of effort to try out something that they might not even like.

At least one game a day, some days were more. And 70%+ of the ranked player-base will always be Bronze, that is the way the system is designed.

They have the free to play champion rotation so that people can try champions without having to invest time + IP into them. This is a free to play game where you can make a new account at any time. if they just gave everyone all the runes and champions people would just continuously make new accounts and abuse the system. Punishments & Bans would mean nothing, being in silver 3 or lower would mean nothing because they could just make a new account and reset their mmr, and at the end of the day their would be no reason to invest time into any single account which doesn't exactly promote a healthy community. You think toxicity is bad now? Give everyone unlimited full access accounts and watch that dumpster fire.

Toastey1 votes

What happens when, with the proper tools (like replays and sandbox), the bottom 70% becomes good enough to match what is currently called Gold? What happens when you have to deal with MMR inflation as players get better at your game?

If toxicity is your argument premise, then explain to me the intense toxicity levied against free week players.

Punishments and bans would mean nothing

Yeah, most people just don't care about the hundreds of dollars they've sunken into skins. Sure, there are people who never buy cosmetics, but I'd wager they're either far too casual to have cared about a ban in the first place, or they're Faker. IP banning exists, too, you know. Not everyone is so determined to troll that they'll proxy their way to a new account.

If a player's skill level is Silver 3, it won't matter how many times they reset their MMR and retry their placements. Players who aren't good enough to climb don't climb, and resetting your MMR doesn't magically guarantee you higher placements. Even if you did place higher, if you consistently performed poorly and couldn't meet your new placement's skill requirements, you'd fall.

Korillo1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Toasted Pigeon,realm=NA,application-id=cIfEodbz,discussion-id=gxdGvvpj,comment-id=000100000000000000000000,timestamp=2016-02-09T15:40:25.663+0000)

What happens when, with the proper tools (like replays and sandbox), the bottom 70% becomes good enough to match what is currently called Gold? What happens when you have to deal with MMR inflation as players get better at your game?

Then there would be an even wider gap between low bronze and high bronze but the currently gold playerbase would slowly become silver and then bronze. The normal curve would simply shift the percentage of players under each division would remain the same.

If you would like a real-life example of this play 100 ranked games on the NA server, then play 100 ranked games on the Korean server (ideally move to Korea to do this so that you have relatively the same ping). Mid gold NA players would be high silver/low bronze on the Korean servers.

If toxicity is your argument premise, then explain to me the intense toxicity levied against free week players.

Yeah, most people just don't care about the hundreds of dollars they've sunken into skins. Sure, there are people who never buy cosmetics, but I'd wager they're either far too casual to have cared about a ban in the first place, or they're Faker. IP banning exists, too, you know. Not everyone is so determined to troll that they'll proxy their way to a new account.

You cannot IP ban for a number of a reasons, the primary one being that their are many, many reasons for different people to play on the same IP.

If a player's skill level is Silver 3, it won't matter how many times they reset their MMR and retry their placements. Players who aren't good enough to climb don't climb, and resetting your MMR doesn't magically guarantee you higher placements. Even if you did place higher, if you consistently performed poorly and couldn't meet your new placement's skill requirements, you'd fall.

No you do not understand the base MMR for a new account is 1200. This is silver 2 MMR. So if you are worse than silver 2 you can just keep making a new account and pretend you are actually silver 2! Yes, you would never climb but you would also never fall!

Toastey1 votes

relatively the same ping

Yeah buddy 65ms and 13ms are the same.

You cannot IP ban

oh and yet. Lo and anon, it has been done before.

You would never climb but you would also never fall!

Okay great. That doesn't really mean anything for anyone else, now does it? If a large pool of players were not good enough to climb out of Silver 2, but bad enough to consistently fall to Silver 3 and have to keep making new accounts, then by that very premise, players who are good enough to climb out of Silver 2 will surpass them naturally. No problems whatsoever.

Dosumn1 votes

You make some valid points. I wouldn't want everything free, that is a horrible business model. The reason we get updated servers, champions, and etc is someone needs to pay for it. I do not feel bad that everyone has to play if they want to own anything. On the other hand the only real money you have to spend is on skins, which is purely cosmetic. To acquire runes, you have to play. I think that is a good thing, it makes you practice to "git gud." There was a game called "Infinite Crisis" great MOBA, I loved it. They struggled because they gave everything for free at first. They ended up shutting down, I was very sad. Great MOBA.

Korillo1 votes

shakes head friend you do not understand, but it is clear you are not here to listen only to argue. Good luck with your idea. I personally believe you will have more success getting the attention of Riot of you thought out your proposal a little better but nonetheless, goodluck.

Toastey1 votes

Is the exchange of ideas truly such a bad thing? What's wrong with verbally sparring, giving and taking ideas and arguments back and forth? Or is being correct the only thing that matters? Is winning all that matters to you? Not improvement? Not learning? Not teaching? Pity.

Korillo1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Toasted Pigeon,realm=NA,application-id=cIfEodbz,discussion-id=gxdGvvpj,comment-id=00020000,timestamp=2016-02-09T16:35:34.896+0000)

Is the exchange of ideas truly such a bad thing? What's wrong with verbally sparring, giving and taking ideas and arguments back and forth? Or is being correct the only thing that matters? Is winning all that matters to you? Not improvement? Not learning? Not teaching? Pity.

yikes

Toastey1 votes

Yikes what mate. You really only care about winning arguments and not for learning from them? I imagine you only play to win, too, and not to improve.

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